"It's a really cool thing to see yourself alongside writers who you've read for years and admired and had fun with," Barry said.

City of Bohane imagines a future for the west of Ireland stripped of technology, in which gangsters deliver vengeance on foot or by tram in a world without cars, laptops or cellphones. His characters dress flamboyantly in mink coats and beanie hats, or all-in-one jump suits and find poetry in an invented vernacular which swoops from firecracker dialogue to bleak pastoral.

It's a "demented malevolent" world, Barry explained, adding that there are "no budget restrictions for a novel".

"It's written in Technicolor," he said. "It's intended to be a big, visceral entertainment as well as a serious language experiment."

He added that the novel started because he thought it would be fun to imagine what "homicidal teenage hipsters" would sound like in the middle of this century, on the principle that if he was having fun as he was writing, readers would be enjoying themselves as well.

The Impac judges hailed his achievement at creating a vision of Ireland in 2053 which "is a place you may not want to be alive in, but you'll certainly relish reading about. This is not a future of shiny technology but one in which history turns in circles and quirks an eyebrow at the idea of 'progress'."

He has no particular plans for spending the prize money, pointing out that "writers don't have wages as such".

"You have good years and lean years," he said. "This award makes it a good year. It buys you a lot of time to be sitting at your desk, inventing deranged little worlds. It allows you to keep going – that's the definition of success for a writer."